Month: October 2004

…and absolutely adored every minute in Sicily. Even if a few places were a bit fishy.
There will be more photos from Sicily and from the wedding. It may take me a few days to sort out, as I have a load of work to catch up on, lots to sort out with the house move, the BBC News archive to catch up on, and I’m off to Amsterdam for a flying visit at the end of the week.

Today is my last day officially working. Tomorrow will be spent running around with cases of wine and wedding cake, and Friday is supposed to be a day for relaxation before the mayhem of Saturday. So, I’m working to tie up a few loose ends and put PFE to bed until I get back from the honeymoon.

Well, the weather forecast is good for Saturday.
The last 24 hours has seen us working on exciting things like the place cards, orders of service and seating plan, as well as ensuring that the DJ plays the music we want to hear (no Robbie, no Queen, no Freddie – but Dancing Queen is ok. Plenty of Stones, Beatles, Van Morrison plus a bit of Madonna and Prince as well as a few newer tracks we like too). And I’ve put my foot down over the whole first dance idea – I don’t want everyone staring at me as I tread on Hels’s toes!

Yesterday was the first anniversary of the day that Hels and I met. On Saturday, directly after we are married, we are going to walk the 100 yards or so from the church to the spot where we first set eyes on each other, just outside Trevor Mottram’s Cook Shop (where we have our wedding list). To get to the church, I’ll walk past the café where we had our first coffee and biscotti together.
It’s been a strange year, at times stressful, mostly wonderfully happy, but undoubtedly the best year ever.

I’ve killed the spam. Having run Spam Guardian on the grayblog server for some time now, and having refined the settings based on the result of over 2500 messages passing through, I’ve now set it to "drop" all messages that it considers to be spam. Suddenly, my inbox is very quiet, but it should mean that I won’t have a gazillion junk mails waiting for me when I get back from the honeymoon.
So, if you send a mail and don’t receive a reply, you’ll know why. However, I think that is extremely unlikely unless you put lots and lots of links in the body, this being one of the criteria for assessing the spam-ness of a mail.

I’ve just made my flight booking for my next trip to the Netherlands – a (literally) flying visit to a trade show in Amsterdam. For the first time, I’ll be flying through the rather excessively named Kent International Airport – what was once RAF Manston – using the services of the very small but very cheap EU Jet. Which will be, um, fun. I like the way that the car park is only a fiver a day, is just 100 yards from the terminal and that there appear to be only four check-in desks.
Anyone else done this route? What were your experiences?

And, to top it off, I’ll be staying in a floating hotel – the Amstel Botel – geddit?